Ali Ghodsi is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks, the data and AI platform company he helped launch in 2013 based on Apache Spark, the open-source data processing engine developed at UC Berkeley's AMPLab, where Ghodsi was a researcher. Ghodsi holds a PhD in computer science and previously worked as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley before focusing full-time on Databricks.
Under Ghodsi's leadership, Databricks has grown into one of the largest privately held enterprise software companies, expanding from its original data engineering roots into a broader AI platform through its Mosaic AI offering, and has pursued an active acquisition strategy to build out AI model training, fine-tuning, and governance capabilities for enterprise customers.